Don't Go To Church - Come to the Party!

At this morning's worship service, the theme was the Parable of the Great Dinner from Luke 14 - that beautiful story where the invited guests are too busy to come to the party, so the host sends his servants out into the streets to bring in the poor, the sick, the lame, and the blind.

Every time I read this parable, I imagine the astounded looks on the faces of the "uninvited" guests who get to enjoy this magnificent feast. I picture the overwhelming joy and gratitude they must have felt to have been given this purely unexpected blessing.

So this morning, when I told this story during the children's sermon, I asked them to describe what the best party ever would be like. Then I asked them to imagine how amazing it would feel to actually get to go to that party. My intention was to get them to understand how great it is that the Kingdom of God invites everyone to an awesome party that is even better than the one that they imagined.

But as I sent the children back to their seats, and then proceeded through the routine of the rest of the service, it hit me square between the eyes that what I had just asked the children to do - to respond to God's grace with overwhelming joy and gratitude - is something that very few of us
adults do, at least in traditional mainline churches.

How many of us - clergy or lay person - come to worship feeling the joy, the awe, and the sheer astonishment at being invited to the Lord's Table? How many of us sing songs of praise, confess our sins, accept our forgiveness, and hear the Word of the Lord with as much enjoyment and as much zest as we would feel at a magnificent banquet?

I have known a few who sincerely feel this much joy in worship, but they are the exceptions rather than the rule. If we are realistic, don't we have to admit that the majority of folks in the pews (and in the pulpit) range somewhere between mild interest and sheer boredom? Don't we have to agree that duty and obligation are much more common motivations than overwhelming joy for people to come to worship?

This is not to say that most people in our churches are not people of sincere faith and commitment. I believe that almost all are. But for churches that still rely on the Sunday morning worship service as their central and defining practice, perhaps it is time for us to ask why our central and defining practice is one that so many people find so un-joyful. Perhaps it is time to ask why, even among our most faithful membership, skipping worship is becoming more and more of a common and acceptable thing to do.

Which brings me back to this morning's service. What I realized in asking the children to think of the Kingdom of God as an awesome party is that we as God's people have forgotten how to party. Or more accurately, we have forgotten how to make worship a party. We are like the invited guests in that parable who were overly occupied with their duties and obligations, and we have forgotten how to lay all that aside and just come to the table with open-hearted exultation.

This, I believe, is one of the chief reasons we have lost a generation and a half of young people. It's not that they don't believe in God, or don't desire the spiritual truth of the Bible, or don't hunger for God's grace. It's that the worship we tend to produce (produce, and not proclaim) does not reflect the overwhelming joy and gratitude that we feel for being called to God's table.

So whether we need to create new worship forms, whether we need to recharge the old forms, or whether we need to bring worship out into the world and into mission will be different in each context. But however we respond to the stifling reality of being "The Frozen Chosen," we need to make our worship a party. Indeed, we need to make everything we do a party. We need to make it the best party the world has ever seen.